I think people kind of talk past each other in these discussions because there isn't a standardised vocabulary. I would call that kind of anaemic Makefile a "ta

I think people kind of talk past each other in these discussions because there isn't a standardised vocabulary. I would call that kind of anaemic Makefile a "task runner" rather than a build system. And yes indeed, a task runner can easily be written as a single POSIX/Bash shellscript that has conditional behaviour based on its first argument. The `case ... in ...` statement in shell is rather nice!